PapaGeek

I've been a math geek since my grade school days in the 1950's. On May 25, 1961, just as I was about to start my high school years, President Kennedy announced "that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." It was only two years prior to that date that engineers began to consider transistors reliable enough to be a competitive replacement for vacuum tubes in computers!

Even in these early stages, I understood the connection between math and the computer and the possibility of space travel, but when I graduated from high school in 1965, college education in computers was restricted to just a few graduate level programs at a very limited number of elite colleges. So, I started my college years as a math major, but after two years I made the decision to get the training in computers that I wanted. The only reasonable place this was available at that time was the US military. I dropped out of college and enlisted for four years. It was worth it! I learned how to program computers from the operating system up. I learned about computer circuitry, Boolean math, and built my own circuit boards to interface the military computers to military hardware.

When I got out of the military in 1971, computer engineering degrees were still hard to find, and now I had a family to think about. I went back to college at nights and got my BS in business with a specialization in "data processing".

Because of my age and my years of math and computer experience, my friends at work recently began to call me papa geek. I managed to capture this web address in December 2009. My intentions are to turn this site into my own personal blog, a place where I can express my views on everything from social to economic to technical issues. My opinions tend to lean to the right on fiscal issues and to the left on social issues, but I'm generally a centrist and, if I achieve my goals, extremists on both sides will take exception to what I write. Your feedback will be welcome and I will publish opposing opinions at my discretion after I verify the author.